Christa Wolf City of Angels or, The Overcoa

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.Maybe that’s precisely what we mean when we say a person has changed.Of course you can coddle your false feelings too.Or maybe it was just fear? I asked myself, when I looked up from my machine.You certainly knew what fear was.You certainly were afraid, that November of 1976 which is under discussion here, when you all were driving home from that meeting at a friend’s and mentally tracing the path of the protest letter you had drawn up together, which, at that very moment, as you arrived back in your apartment, might well have already been passed up the various steps of the “apparatus” to “Number One” and also, as a copy, transmitted wirelessly out of the divided city, via the Western news agency you had given it to, to various radio stations, broadcasts that, even if the stations obeyed the delay period imposed on them, would unleash a firestorm that you could only vaguely imagine.They’ll throw us in jail, said the comrade of yours sitting in the backseat.And you didn’t really believe that the singer they had expatriated would really be allowed to return to the country because of your protest, did you? That was the question people kept asking you—some of them furious, some despondent, some cowardly—and all of you said “Yes, we did,” or “No,” depending who was asking or who had called you in for questioning, and on whether you were acting strategically or straightforwardly, and in any case, you all said that you had to do it, and that was the honest truth, and sometimes you added that this singer’s expatriation recalled Germany’s darkest hours and that you would not have been able to continue to write if you had accepted it without saying something.Was the word “socialist” spoken? It certainly was.It was used on both sides, as accusation and as defense, and the ones who felt worst about their own cowardice were the ones who were angriest with you and repeated the word “damage” most often: you and the others had done your country irreparable “damage.” You seized on that word and threw it back.Only when an old comrade, a Jewish woman who had spent many years in the emigration, shouted at you in a trembling voice during an assembly that you wanted to bring back the concentration camps did you and the others stay silent, there was nothing to say to that, and you knew: It was hopeless.That was when the pain came.Pain and rage at the people sitting across from you, angry or cold, trying to get you to recant and to reveal the originator of the conspiracy and to play you off against each other, and the realization grew and grew that you and they were enemies, irreconcilable enemies—that there was no longer any common language between you, or any shared future.It was early in the morning, I couldn’t take it anymore in my apartment in the MS.VICTORIA and I walked to the Ocean Park Promenade.The tape player of memory kept running in my head, I thought it was really too bad about the diary in which, in a sulfur bath in Hungary a year after that winter of our discontent, you had written out an exact chronicle of the events, and which you put in your suitcase like a criminal, so that you would not have it on you in case you were searched; the suitcase was loaded into the airplane with the other suitcases but it never arrived at the Leipzig airport.You and G.waited at the lost luggage counter for a long time, submitted every possible search request designed for such cases, which almost always, they assured you, brought results.And yet you did not include in the list of the missing objects the diary you missed most.Nothing was found, but the travel insurance replaced all of the lost objects without a hitch—towels and nightgown and shoes—just not the diary, which couldn’t officially exist at all.It was documented nowhere, not even by me, to be safe, and so it was easy for it to dissolve into nothingness, and now there is nothing to compel anyone to believe it ever existed since even the official files, in which I had placed a certain hope, failed in this particular case: the diary was not to be found in the big green wooden chest with the mass of other documents, and I caught myself criticizing the people who had kept themselves so well informed about everything we did for being so careless.But was it their job to be complete? Or truthful?We also found no record in the files of that dark night when a fully manned police squad car was stationed at the corner across from your house, for hours.You and G.were standing at the window behind the curtain, which you had hung only after the young gentlemen in their cars had put your apartment under observation from the parking lot on the other side of the street.You and G.saw someone from the squad car separate from the team and walk to the phone booth on your side of the street, at which point your own telephone immediately started ringing, in the middle of the night, and when you picked up the phone no one on the other end of the line said anything, and the squad car drove off after a while, and you and G.could go to bed, though without being able to fall asleep.The next day, the official party newspaper was delivered late, not until noon [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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